page_title: Mocha, Yemen
section_title: Overview
hierarchical_section_title: Mocha, Yemen / Overview
caption_attribution_description: English: View of Mocha during the second half of the 17th century. The Dutch flag is flying over a Dutch East India Company (VOC) ship in the foreground, as well as over the VOC factory seen toward the left of the picture. The English East India Company factory is visible near the center. Another flag can be seen flying on the right, most likely over the Danish East India Co. factory. The French were to establish their own factory during the early years of the 18th. century. However, by the 1740s Mocha was quickly losing its commercial importance when the Dutch East Indies and Brazil became important centers of coffee cultivation. Cropped from an engraving by Dutch geographer/mapmaker Olfert DAPPER published in 1680.
context_page_description: Mocha, also known as al-Makha, is a port city on the Red Sea coast of Yemen. Until Aden and al Hudaydah eclipsed it in the 19th century, Mocha was the principal port for Yemen's capital, Sanaʽa.
context_section_description: Mocha is famous for being the major marketplace for coffee (Coffea arabica) from the 15th century until the early 18th century. Even after other sources of coffee were found, Mocha beans (also called Sanani or Mocha Sanani beans, meaning from Sana'a) continued to be prized for their distinctive flavor—and remain so even today. The coffee itself did not grow in Mocha, but was transported from places inland to the port in Mocha, where it was shipped abroad.
  According to the Portuguese Jesuit missionary Jerónimo Lobo, who sailed the Red Sea in 1625, Mocha was "formerly of limited reputation and trade" but since "the Turkish assumption of power throughout Arabia, it has become the major city of the territory under Turkish domination, even though it is not the Pasha's place of residence, which is two days' journey inland in the city of Sana'a." Lobo adds that its importance as a port was also due to the Ottoman law that required all ships entering the Red Sea to put in at Mocha and pay duty on their cargoes.
caption: European factories at Mocha in the late 17th century
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